Question of the Day – Business Execution

Question - Execution is the unaddressed issue in the business world today. The absence of execution is the single biggest obstacle to success and the cause of most disappointments attributed to other causes. How do you most effectively deal with this?

Execution is a discipline and a system. Execution must be built into a company’s strategy, its goals, and its culture. And the leadership of the organization must be deeply engaged in it. For a business to sustain predictable success, an emphasis on execution must be built into the culture.

 Don’t confuse execution with tactics. Execution is a systematic process of rigorously discussing how’s and what’s, questioning, tenaciously following through, and ensuring accountability.

 Execution includes making assumptions about the business environment, assessing the organization’s capabilities, linking strategy to operations and the people who are going to implement the strategy, synchronizing those people and their various disciplines, and linking rewards to outcomes. It also includes mechanisms for changing assumptions as the environment evolves and upgrading the company’s capabilities to meet the challenges of an ambitious strategy.

The culture, established by the company’s leadership, forms the attitudes about the “essence” of a successful company: work focus, fellow workers, and followership. The leadership creates this imprint – and it determines how successful the business will become. 

Where does this come from? Leadership. It’s what the Academy of Family Business has spent years developing - curriculum designed to help deliver this kind of leadership. To learn more about the training available to strengthen leadership, discipline and performance, please visit us at: info@myAFB.org